Council of Europe Regional Training Programme in Syracuse, Sicily (March 2012)

The success of large scale money laundering and corruption investigations depends largely upon the ability of the criminal investigator and prosecutor to follow the trail of money and other assets. To benefit from profit-generating crime, criminals are usually forced to launder the proceeds to hide the origins thereof. The profits generated by crime are often transferred to financial centres in an attempt to thwart or complicate efforts by law enforcement agencies to identify and trace assets acquired in the process. The first step in the asset recovery process is identifying where assets are held. Assisting victim countries to identify assets and secure international co-operation in recovering such assets, and to obtain convictions through hands-on practical training remains fundamental to any capacity building efforts.

Experts from the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) recently held a training workshop on “Investigating Corruption and Money Laundering and Recovering Stolen Assets” within the framework of the European Union Eastern Partnership and Council of Europe Facility (EaP/CoE Facility) Project on “Good Governance and Fight against Corruption”. The training was organised with the support of the Istituto Superiore Internazionale di Scienze Criminali (ISISC), and held in Syracuse, Italy, during the period 12 – 16 March 2012.

It involved six EaP countries, with the aim to enhance their capacities in analysing, investigating and prosecuting large scale international money laundering and corruption cases. The workshop brought together investigators and prosecutors from the following countries: i.e. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. It provided an opportunity for networking within the region in the interests of uniting efforts to fight against corruption.

The programme involved an interactive combination of foundation building lectures, mini workshops, and a complex simulated corruption/money laundering investigation case. It was designed to take practitioners from the basics of corruption and money laundering violations and mutual legal assistance (MLA) to a very advanced level by requiring participants to actually perform a complex investigation. Given the fact that the concepts of asset tracing and recovery, anti-money laundering, corruption investigation and mutual legal assistance are all so interconnected, they were addressed holistically during the course of the training programme.

The ICAR team is in the process of compiling a training manual for investigators and prosecutors for submission to the Council of Europe Secretariat later this year.